Windows 2000 TweakUI Problems
cfraser
Okay. Here's a tough one.
I am running Windows 2000, 1.5 GHz processor, 192MB of RAM and up until
now a remarkably healthy system.
However, me being me, I was making some changes and decided to have
most of my icons (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Control Panel etc) on the
desktop. So, I used my old TweakUI friend to hide "Network and
Dial Up Connections" and "Control Panel" from Start Menu
settings - I mean, why have them in two places, right?
So far so good. I closed out of TweakUI, verified the changes had taken
place, and then I realised I had forgotten something. So I went to go
into TweakUI again from the Desktop and I was given a message "Due
to restrictions in effect on this computer, the operation has been
cancelled. Please contact your systems administrator for more
information". I had obviously done something wrong, so to be on
the safe side I thought I'd log off and on again - seems to be no real
problems here accept now ANY control panel applet shortcut on my
desktop wouldn't work. But then I noticed something: Control Panel was
-GONE- from "My Computer"!! Becoming increasingly aware I had
made a faux-pas I restarted the computer - boot up and log on was fine
is if nothing was ever wrong.
But I began to notice that it was not only the control panel that was
not working. Safely Remove Hardware, Desktop Properties, even System
Properties were all displaying this Restrictions message - help! But
there's more. I went into the registry, hoping, preying I could undo
the changes, searched for "Tweak UI" and deleted the string
data. Took a screenshot before just in case. The delete didn't help, so
using the screenshot I took I inputted the data again as it was before.
Still to no avail.
Okay now I was really freaked! So I rebooted into LastKnownGood
Configuration and hell, that took us back in time about 2 minutes! The
system has obviously not gone seriously wrong, but it is a small error
causing much larger knock-on effects. Still not convinced I wouldn't
need an OS reinstall, I ran chkdsk and it scanned the computer next
time I booted, the volume was reported to have no errors and I was on
my way again.
I was planning to a repair installation of Windows, but because I have
an external CD Drive I usually get a blue screen error when the CD
loads from DOS. How I got the system on there is a complete other
story, and I was surprised at another CNET member called
"smithcomp" who seemed to have a strangely similar setup to
mine.
The funny thing is, apart form this, my applications, games and the
system runs tickety-boo, all except from this minor annoyance. Since
the control panel is completely blocked off, I cannot even access any
of the *.cpl files from the run command, and can not get into User
Accounts to make another user account, as I know that would fix the
problem, since the guest account works fine. I cannot uninstall TweakUI
either - so I'm trapped!
So is there some kind of Registry Key I need to restore to make the
control panel come back? Or am I just going to have to back up,
re-format and spend hours tailoring the system back to the state I find
it workable in?
Thanks anyone for your time.
PS. The options I disabled in TweakUI had absolutely no indications
that there might be other consequences, otherwise I would have left
things as they were.
PPS. I CAN still access the computer management console, the Command
Prompt and the Registry Editor.
Thanks again!